Issue with network configuration in Debian 12
There is a compatibility issue in the network configuration generated by Virtualmin for Debian 12 systems. The configuration uses the ifconfig
command, which is no longer included by default in Debian 12.
Problem details:
- The issue occurs when adding a new IPv6 network interface during the “Create Virtual Server” process that wasn’t previously active
- In
/etc/network/interfaces
, there is a line usingifconfig
to add an additional IPv6 address:
up ifconfig eth0 inet6 add 2001:db8:1234:5678:abcd:1234:5678:abcd/64
- The
ifconfig
command is part of thenet-tools
package, which is no longer installed by default in Debian 12 - This causes network configuration to fail when using the default Debian 12 installation
Consequences:
- The networking service fails to start during boot
- As a result, nginx also fails to start during the boot process
- This leads to system services not working properly after installation
Additional issue with manual fixes:
- If a user manually corrects the command in
/etc/network/interfaces
by changing fromifconfig
toip
, this fix is completely deleted when creating another virtual server
Solution:
Replace the ifconfig
command with the equivalent ip
command (from the iproute2
package) in the Virtualmin code that generates network configurations:
up ip -6 addr add 2001:db8:1234:5678:abcd:1234:5678:abcd/64 dev eth0
This modification ensures compatibility with Debian 12’s default networking tools without requiring additional packages to be installed, and would need to be implemented in the Virtualmin code that generates these configuration files.